With his flair for visual storytelling and a gift for grounded, working-class hero characters rooted in everyday life, Stephen King writes novels and short stories that seem ideally suited to both big- and small-screen treatment.

It’s a coincidence that the sprawling, three-night National Geographic documentary series The 80s: The Decade That Made Us follows so closely on the heels of the eulogies for Margaret Thatcher, a politician who, like Ronald Reagan, came to epitomize the decade in which she ruled.